The '9-1-1' scooter and other worst toys for Christmas

From annoying, noisy toys that you want to hurl against the wall to just plain scary ones, here are the worst toys of 2012:

6. The Logo Board Game

Leanne Shirtliffe
One reviewer refers to this game as 'capitalism flash cards.'

This game receives the Gullible Award. The Logo Board Game is Trivial Pursuit for brand-name junkies, testing your knowledge of logos, slogans, and jingles. One reviewer refers to the game as “capitalism flash cards.” Good luck if you want to play this with your children, unless they’re already middle-aged; many of the logos and brands, like the Kool Aid guy, are a few decades old. The Logo Board Game retails for $26.99; you could buy a lot of Kool Aid for that price.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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